A lot of words have already been written this week, and hopefully a lot more will be written in the next few weeks, months and years, about the great and beloved character actor Dick Miller, who passed away on January 30th in Burbank, California at age 90.  A quick look at his bio page on…

I knew it was coming, but now that it’s finally here, it feels a little weird to have to admit it. After almost 50 years of watching and following the Oscars (the first Academy Award ceremony I saw was for the movies released in 1969), I find myself feeling genuinely indifferent to the whole megillah….

When is the best not the best? I think the answer to this non-rhetorical question that maybe nobody would ever ask in the first place has to be, when one hasn’t the breadth of experience to really answer with any certainty or credibility. Best cheeseburger in my neighborhood? Well, I haven’t sampled them all. But…

Those who possess more than my cursory knowledge of the history of British royalty have made it clear Yorgos Lanthimos’s new movie The Favourite is bollocks as a historical document. This is a claim that is most likely true, and frankly, I don’t have a problem with that– I doubt the director of Dogtooth and The…

Trailers From Hell readers, as well as all film fans in the Los Angeles area, are getting a special treat this coming Friday evening, when Joe Dante’s marvelous 2010 3D thriller The Hole screens at the TCL Chinese Theaters. The event marks the official launch of the new multimedia brand Untold Horror which, according to…

Every so often the stars align in such a way as to allow a perfectly inert and “nonproductive” weekend spent in the company of four, or five, or maybe even six movies, the sort of cine-bliss-out designed to decompress the mind and spirit after a particularly insistent week of breadwinning. Back in the salad days,…

The cry came forth from a dark corner of my living room as it usually does this time of year, as it does sometimes during other parts of the year too. It was my wife, shrieking from the depths of her soul, articulating a cry of despair and disbelief: “You’re watching this again??!!” As the…

Game Night is as high concept a comedy as they come—a group of very competitive friends who do a weekly game night together find themselves entangled in a kidnapping-smuggling-murder situation which they initially believe is part of an elaborate role-playing extension of their usual easygoing, harmless suburban fun—and as I punched it up on HBO…

Back in the summer of 2008, I absorbed all the terrible advance notices that the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer was racking up, saw it on opening night, and was delighted to discover that I loved it. I became somewhat evangelistic about the movie, telling everyone I knew that the cranky critics and indifferent audiences were wrong, seeing…

This past weekend Michael Moore’s new movie Fahrenheit 11/9, about how the world as we know it in the Trump age came to be, didn’t set the box office on fire in the manner of his previous incendiary screed against the Bush administration, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). And speaking as someone who doesn’t watch box-office predictions…

In its inaugural year, 2005, I began writing for the Muriel Awards, a year-end voting collective dedicated to summing up the year’s achievements which features accompanying essays by its members, and I’ve written for them every year since. Six years ago, Muriels creator Paul Clark (the award is named after his beloved guinea pig, and…

This past week Burt Reynolds, perhaps the most self-deprecating movie star to ever cruise to box-office domination, died during a hospital stay in Jupiter, Florida, at the age of 82.  “I’m pretty passionate about my work,” he once said, “even though I sometimes have this realization on the second day of shooting that I’m doing…

Had I not recently revisited Don Siegel’s dusty, nail-hard crime thriller Charley Varrick, in fact just the night before seeing Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Three Times, it stands to reason that I probably would not have found myself thinking about the Walter Matthau-starring crime thriller midway through the Taiwanese director’s film. After all, Siegel’s tale of morally…

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be brief. The issue here is not whether we broke a few rules or took a few liberties with our female party guests. We did. But you can’t hold a whole fraternity responsible for the behavior of a few sick, perverted individuals. For if you do, then shouldn’t we blame the…

“Who are you?” “B-I-double F-iffle. Biffle! S-H-double O-ooster. Shooster! We’re Biffle and Shooster! Need we say more?” In 1928, the vaudeville comedy duo of Benny Biffle and Sam Shooster made the transition from the stage to the nascent medium of talking pictures with a pair of Vitaphone one-reelers. That move was a modest but immediate…

Here it is, the second week of July already, and I feel as though I’ve barely seen anything in the realm of theatrical movies. Compared to the average movie critic anyway, who probably sees three or four (new) movies a week, to say nothing of the ones she/he sees at home. But my movie consumption…

My eldest daughter graduated from high school this week, an event that most parents who have been through it before will understand can be stressful and emotional traumatic, for the eager graduates, of course, but for us old codgers too. For her, the promise of a new road ahead, full of uncertainty, new experiences and…

The following is a slightly re-edited version of a piece that ran during the early days of my blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, posted on April 3, 2007, in which I took some time to acknowledge one of my favorite movie stars, the inimitable force of nature known as Patsy Kelly. Eleven…

People always say it, and I often do myself: “Seeing (Movie X)  on the big screen again was like seeing it for the first time!” This was emphatically not true for me last night when I took my daughter  to see 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood. (It was her first…

TEN THINGS I LEARNED AT TCMFF 2018 Yet another TCM Classic Film Festival is in the bank—the ninth out of nine I’ve been privileged to attend. For those who have a mind to, my extended coverage of the festival—not a blow-by-blow of everything I did, but a look at some of the highlights—is available at…

So much time, so few movies to see. Scratch that. Reverse it. Running a little later than usual this year, the 2018 Turner Classic Movies Film Festival gets under way this coming Thursday, screening approximately 88 films and special programs over the course of the festival’s three-and-a-half days, beginning Thursday evening, and no doubt about…

“Walt Whitman once said, ‘I see great things in baseball. It’s our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.’ You could look it up.” — Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) in Bull Durham Bull Durham, Ron Shelton’s beloved ode to the piquant ambience and perhaps more elusive spirituality…

The Scarlet Empress (1934), starring Marlene Dietrich, John Lodge, Sam Jaffe, Louise Dresser and “a supporting cast of 1,000 players,” is director Josef von Sternberg at his most grandiose and excessive, which is just another way of saying “at his best,” at the height of a state of expressive delirium no other director has ever…

The title of Julia Marchese’s testimonial documentary on the history of Los Angeles’ the New Beverly Cinema, Out of Print, began, as her film did, as a way of suggesting the dark future which lay in store for the prospect of 35mm film distribution and exhibition in the early stages of this decade’s industry switch-over…

God bless Bonnie and Clyde. One year ago, the already well-blessed Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty found themselves onstage at the Academy Awards, together again to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the release of the Arthur Penn-directed movie that pretty much ignited about eight years of what many consider the last “golden age” of American…

“Art should surprise us.” – worker at a salt processing plant upon leaving his shift and discovering a giant photographed mural of his coworkers adorning a wall outside the facility, in Faces Places If Faces Places, the latest documentary from French Nouvelle Vague legend (some call her the Grandmother of the French New Wave) Agnès Varda,…